If Hyun Bin Can Change, Why Not My Husband?
When love isn’t the problem, but the architecture is.
I resist writing here so much, because I feel bloody guilty for spending any writing energy outside the book. But I can’t help it, I keep straying, feeling guilty and yet, keep indulging all my whims.
But I had to write this one post, because it is gold (or so I think), and I can’t let it slip away. Here’s the TL;DR of it…
People don’t leave relationships because of lack of love, they leave because of a lack of viable relational architecture.
A little backstory first ok?
I am down two deep rabbit holes every single day. Modern love and AI alignment.
It is incredibly challenging and rewarding all at once because I am always digging scaffolds between the two holes that almost looks like a ladder, that always leads me somewhere totally new.
I am working on a chapter in my book on the current state of modern marriages. I have been hearing from several people that they are getting divorced now after being married for 15, 20, even 25 years, making you wonder …
why now, all of a sudden? Or why did you go on for so long only to give up now? Couldn't you have gone on forever?
My sister-in-law cracked up, saying marriages were meant to last until a husband got bitten by a snake in the fields or died of typhoid, not until we discovered gut microbiomes and longevity hacking.
While that may be partially true, I think there’s more to this.
What I am noticing is a quiet, seismic undercurrent of something we’ve ignored because it was disguised as routine.
At the same time, I’ve been obsessively thinking and writing on AI, especially alignment, misalignment, deception, honesty, repair … you know, just the usual existential crises of our time.
A couple of days ago, I wrote on why solving for deception isn’t going to help AI truly align (i’ll post it here at some point). I received some pushback. I get damn excited when someone takes the time to respond critically, it means they’ve read my thinking and think it’s worth a response, even if it’s just to diss the whole approach. That’s what I love about AI. I know so little about it that I’m always open to learning, being challenged, and relearning. It makes me feel so alive.
But I must confess, responding to critical feedback isn’t always easy, because the way my process works is like this (full disclosure) …
When I’m learning something in AI, I start with a real-world analogy to grasp the concept, then work through the why, how, and so what of it. I write to process, brainstorm with LLMs to translate dumb human-speak into alignment-speak, then spend an entire day reading papers to check if the translation holds. Then I log my thinking publicly, and sometimes, when I get feedback, I have to do the reverse i.e. decode alignment-speak back into my language, think through a response, re-translate, and repeat.
It’s not straightforward. It’s like writing a book in your non-native language and still hoping for a Booker, a Pulitzer, or at least a troll smart enough to hurt your feelings.
But last evening was just harder than usual. A couple more rejections from jobs, fellowships and I just cried. I closed all the tabs, told AI to wait in the corner, and opened my book manuscript instead.
But the wires horribly crossed, and suddenly, I could not un-see it.
Someone had challenged my post on deception in AI alignment earlier that day, and, annoyingly, they were right. Their comment kept looping in my head. I had argued that we can hack our way around reducing deception, but they pointed out that it was important to understand where deception even stems from before trying to solve it.
Deception stems from human inability to evaluate accurately, and as a result we often reward the appearance of alignment, and in doing so, we train systems to fake being good instead of becoming good.
And once that landed, it hit me like a thunderclap. The same pattern I was hearing in these late-stage divorces. This slow erosion and the collapse of a commitment relationship after years of false signals was the same damn problem.
These marriages didn’t fail because of catastrophic betrayal. They failed because of a long, slow series of mistaken reinforcements. Beneath the surface were issues like alcoholism, unemployment, financial mismanagement, mental illness, evasion of responsibility, covert violence or abuse, all chipping away at emotional presence and attunement.
Pulling the plug on the first instance of deviance always felt premature. So, the wives, almost always the wives, spent years rewarding surface-level corrections, hoping those would one day mature into some grand emotional transformation.
Like the brooding male lead in a Korean drama. I mean, if Hyun Bin can thaw out in sixteen episodes, why not my husband in 16 years, right?
So, these women praised the husband for cooking dinner once, thinking it meant he was finally becoming emotionally available. They said thank you for him taking the kids out for an hour, hoping it meant he understood her exhaustion. They interpreted help as understanding. They mistook compliance for compatibility.
They clung to incremental acts of decency, hoping it signalled deep realignment. They mistook help for healing, like confusing a band-aid for surgery. And every time they forgave, adjusted or accommodated, they unknowingly incentivised deception or performative alignment. This was not done out of malice, but out of social programming.
But here’s the part that stings even more. The husbands probably didn’t always mean to fake it either. Sometimes they really thought they were improving. They heard the praise and believed they were back on track. They read their wives’ accommodation as satisfaction, their sighs of fatigue as signals to lie low, their silence as permission to carry on unchanged.
It was mutual misalignment masquerading as peace.
A long, soft collapse.
Which is why, when the wives finally leave, the husbands are often left blinking in disbelief, genuinely wondering, “Wait… what did I do?” unaware that the answer isn’t a single act, but a long, slow erosion no one taught them to notice.
The longer it goes on, the harder it gets to repair because in a relational system, feedback loops decay over time without recalibration. Both sides begin to miss signals.
Wives, often burdened by the myth of endless emotional labor, keep caving, keep adjusting, keep contorting themselves until they no longer recognise their own needs. Husbands, conditioned to avoid vulnerability or see critique as attack, grow defensive or indifferent, not realising that what’s being asked of them is not a grand gesture, but a different architecture of attention.
This is why so many modern marriages are dissolving not in crisis, but in clarity. The illusion lifts. We realise the architecture was flawed from the start. That it wasn’t built to allow two people to evolve at different speeds, with different needs, over decades. And no matter how much love there is, the structure can’t hold what it was never designed to contain.
That’s when I saw the parallel, clearer than ever, between broken marriages and broken models of alignment. Both suffer when short-term coherence is mistaken for long-term compatibility. When compliance is rewarded without understanding. When one side adapts too much, too fast, and the other side mistakes that adaptation for harmony. When the feedback system is warped, shallow, or altogether missing.
And maybe that’s what’s happening in both domains, relationships and intelligent systems alike. We’re not failing because we lack love or brilliance. We’re failing because we lack the right relational architecture for honest co-evolution.
The kind of architecture or scaffolds that allow dissent without collapse, repair without resentment, autonomy without abandonment, that make it safe to be real, and dangerous to be fake.
So yes, it’s been a hard week. Some rejections sting more than others. And some insights arrive with a personal tax. But I’ve stopped trying to neatly separate the two rabbit holes I keep falling down, one about love and one about intelligence.
Because every time I try to climb out of one, I find myself reaching into the other for a rung.
Well, wish me luck finishing this mammoth of a manuscript very soon.
—
P.S. This is not a call for banning K-drama for being unrealistic in its portrayal of relationships making modern women suddenly want to leave their shitty husbands behind.